1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer executable problem information analysis program for the purpose of making a problem information analysis apparatus for analyzing problem information of various phenomena, a problem information analysis apparatus and a problem information analysis method which is carried out by the problem information analysis apparatus, and in particular to the problem information analysis program, problem information analysis apparatus and problem information analysis method for analyzing problem information such as incident information occurring in a medical practice site, failure information occurring in a development of a computer software program, accident information occurring during operations of a large scale plant for a power generation plant or a factory.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, a risk management has become increasingly important. The risk management is defined as clarifying problems which possibly occur in advance and determining countermeasures for each problem in advance, for which historical problem information is utilized. If such historical problem information is in a small quantity, a person or persons can grasp its entirety, whereas if many facts are accumulated, a computer becomes a necessity for assisting to utilize them.
For example, a Laid-Open Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 09-114801 has disclosed a technique for use in an apparatus for evaluating a risk relating to a business enterprise for presenting, to a client, historical problem(s) that happened in a similar business enterprise with its degree of effect and that of reducing it by covering with an insurance, by using information, as input, relating to the enterprise such as the type of business, size and financial information of the business enterprise as a subject of evaluation.
And a Laid-Open Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2003-99601 has disclosed a technique used in an apparatus, for evaluating a risk relating to a facility, for calculating a probability of problem occurrence from historical problem cases and a degree of influence at a problem occurrence and presenting them to a client by using facility information of a facility as a subject of evaluation and information of the surrounding area as input.
And a Laid-Open Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2005-100026 has disclosed a technique for enabling an automatic extraction of monitoring item(s) for monitoring a condition of an apparatus by evaluating a failure cause and monitoring item(s), respectively, relating to the apparatus having a plurality of failure causes and a plurality of monitoring items.
The conventional technique, however, was face with an issue (N.B.: in order to avoid confusion with “problem” as a subject of requiring a solution, the word “issue” is used for the same semantic as a problem in this specification) of being unable to calculate information (i.e., a degree of difficulty of avoiding a problem) for indicating how difficult it is to solve a problem, while it was possible to calculate information such as a likelihood of a problem occurrence and an influence of the problem once it should occur.
This information is of the same importance as the one calculable by the conventional technique which enables an analyst to acquire useful knowledge by carrying out an analysis if there is such information. However, an appropriate value of the degree of difficulty of avoiding a problem is difficult to calculate by merely examining each problem case independently. For instance, similar problem may have occurred due to different causes. In order to prevent such issues, countermeasures must be taken for all these plural causes. Consequently, it is not possible to understand a plurality of causes from only one problem, thus being faced with an issue of being unable to evaluate a degree of difficulty of avoiding the problem.
Meanwhile, considering using a degree of difficulty of avoiding a problem for planning a countermeasure, the degree of difficulty of avoiding a problem is useful if it is defined based on various view points. For instance, a degree of difficulty of avoiding a problem based on a view point of “a problem for which a practical cost of the countermeasure is high has a high degree of difficulty of avoiding a problem” is useful to implement a risk management with a high cost performance. And a degree of difficulty of avoiding a problem based on a view point of “a problem which occurred despite a countermeasure had been taken has a high degree of difficulty of avoiding a problem” is useful for a task to extract an inadequacy of the past risk management.
Incidentally, a technique called an automatic categorization using a mechanical learning is widely used as a method for estimating an attribute of each data (i.e., this corresponds to a degree of difficulty of avoiding a problem noted in a problem case according to an example of the present invention). According to this technique, an apparatus is disposed to learn a small number of problem cases invested respectively with correct solutions in advance as teacher data and estimate a category regarding a problem case not invested with a category based on the aforementioned learning result. In order to apply the technique to a judgment of a degree of difficulty of avoiding a problem, however, such teacher data must be created, thus bringing about a problem of being unable to create appropriate teacher data because a creation of the teacher data requires a cost and also a provision of an appropriate difficulty of a problem to each problem case is difficult even by spending a manpower.